Forgiveness Is The Key To Healing

"What you feel is important and expressing it is an important step toward healing yourself and someone else." -Iyanla Vanzant

So today I binged watched Iyanla Vanzant's Healing House. The shows we're dealing with the angry black woman stereotype that most black women in this country deals with. Our hurt and anger we project today is linked to things from the past that were never addressed.  I haven't went through all the things the ladies have been through but I could honestly see & feel their hurt. There were women on there that have been sexually abused as kids by men they trusted, abandoned by their fathers & mothers, hurt by boyfriends and husbands, and etc. One thing Iyanla made the ladies do were face these issues head on. These ladies had to admit that their current life and patterns are being dictated by past wounds they experienced as children. A lot of time we suppress thoughts & feelings because who wants to feel those icky things? Who wants to think about the things and people who caused the pain? Well today I can be honest... the first man to hurt me was my dad. My dad has been locked up for 17 years. The last time I saw him was when I was like 11. Even when he was out I hardly ever seen him. As a kid... me, my mom, & sister's experienced things I wouldn't wish on anyone. Plenty of times I wished that he would rescue me and save me from the abused I suffered from a man that claimed he loved me and my family.  I felt abandoned and hurt. I felt like he didn't love me. I wonder what was wrong with me. Him never being there for me created a void that I searched for other men to fill. I wanted them to love me enough not to leave and abandon me. I became needy and always seeking happiness from the man I was dating. I became so good at covering up emotions and hurt. Putting up with people treating me like shit. Moving on like my heart wasn't' hurting. Not showing emotions was a way of life for me. Being tough was needed because I didn't want to hurt anymore. Today though... admit that I'm tried. Tired of carrying around baggage that is weighing me down. I'm healing that little girl and I know the first step is forgiving my father & myself. The act of forgiveness opens up the doors of healing and I'm open to that healing as of today.   I truly believe in this journey I'm on. I know that it's not always positive energy and flowers. I know I have to go into the dark and shine light on the issues that need to be let go. I hope all that read this begin to analyze patterns of hurt & know that the pain a lot of times come from the child within that never got the healing they needed. Love You. 

Peace & Blessings,

Contessa

Post Traumatic Relationships

"It's hard when your lady don't believe what you say and what did in the past you gotta live with today!" Common; Rapper, Actor, Poet


I was asked by a young lady to write about my opinion of why black relationships fail so often. Long story short, we don't know how to treat each other. In fact, we were systematically taught how to mistreat each other. In the 60's there was a "No Man in the house" rule. A regulation that was formally applied to certain jurisdictions that denied poor families Welfare payments in the event that a man resided under same roof as them. Why would this ever be enacted? If you ask me, if you kill the head, the body will fall. The 60's were filled with what would be eventually known as the Civil Rights Movement. A movement in which black people, the disenfranchised and oppressed, were fighting for every right promised to us. To be treated as basic human beings. Barely 100 years removed from slavery, this was met with a lot of resistance. But what was our biggest weapon? Our unity. The accomplishments made to that point and beyond were products of good leaders and devoted followers. The family structure was of supreme importance. While both man and woman were both profoundly important in the movement and in their own personal households, men led. Men protected.  Men provided. All of which are traditionally the man's role. So like any other unified group, how do you dismantle it? You take down the leader. In the civil rights movement they killed most of the male leaders. From Martin and Malcolm, to Fred Hampton and Medgar Evers; you name the leader they killed HIM. The ones they couldn't kill they discredited, banished, and silenced; see: Huey P Newton, Minister Farrakhan. So it is my belief they planned successfully to do this with the black family. This "rule" was a big part of that plan. Under that rule they made poverty a bargaining chip. They made a woman's decision on whether or not to stay with her husband a business decision. Not to say no mother should've or would've ever left her husband but this rule made it a decision that had to be about more than love and structure. See evidence of the domino effect now on social media. How often is it discussed on social platforms, amongst black people, about how much a man should make. How much a man should pay for this and that. How much rent should a man require his woman to pay. All of this is a product of this rule. The questions come from a generation of kids who need guidance and they didn't get it. We're the first generation where the black family was not a staple, majority wise. My mom was born in the 60's. My grandma's generation is the last generation in my family that had long marriages across the board. Then you think about the crack epidemic of the 80's. How "Iran Contra" was a planned, signed, and executed attack against the black community. Against the inner cities. Against black families. Crack was IMPLANTED into our communities to destroy us from the inside out. To decimate morals and structure with addiction and incarceration. Leaving mothers to fend for themselves. Leaving kids with both parents addicted to fend for themselves. Incarcerating black men at genocide proportions with mandatory minimum sentences that rivaled football jersey numbers.This was the genesis of the reason "we don't know how to treat each other".

So that's the backstory. The effects would be many and what I compare that to is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Commonly diagnosed amongst returned war veterans. People who have been to battle, seen catastrophic tragedies then when it was time to return their bodies to normalcy, their minds never could. Being black in America you almost inherit PTSD. So we have generations of women who have seen their mothers raise them and their siblings alone. Seen black women be the least married, the most abused, the most neglected. Seen black men not take care of their families. Put vices ahead of responsibilities. Because there's no order. There's no leadership. There's no recourse. Because the domino effect of the no man in the house rule and drug addiction, alcohol addiction (because there's a liquor store on ever corner in black impoverished communities) is a group of people that no longer take care of each other. No longer prioritize unity and education. So there's so much anger. So much neglect. So much violence. So many catastrophic tragedies seen your whole life, on a daily basis, so when it's time to have a relationship what is your normalcy? There's an argument in many subjects of nature vs nurture, I typically lean towards nurture in most cases. In the case of black relationships or lack thereof it's definitely a matter of nurture. This is what we've seen. It's what we still see. And even though the No man in the house rule is officially repealed, it's still enacted. Ask any woman on welfare. Now it's just a matter of combined income. The new "no man in the house" rule is reality tv. Or tv in general. Television networks "program". So it's no coincidence that the biggest shows and most prevalent shows programmed for blacks 18-25 are reality shows centered completely around dysfunctional relationships. Whether it's love and hip-hop or Black ink which have both fall and spring seasons so they're almost always in season. Shows where the very requirement to be on the show is you have to be cheating or violent or the victim of one of those two. There's no coincidence that two biggest black female lead shows on ABC are black women who almost exclusively date white men. I have no issue with interracial dating I'm just painting the picture of how they are teaching us how to mistreat each other then reiterating that black men aren't good enough or won't treat black women good enough. It's social engineering. So seeing this constantly over and over. These shows being on network television during primetime slots also allow kids to be predisposed to these things at an early age. While their brain, their habits, their desires, and their morality is still forming. So if you see murder everyday, that effects you and desensitizes you uncontrollably, what do you think this does? If all you see at home and on tv is black people disrespecting each other and their relationship, cheating and being hyper sexual, hyper substance abusers, you're programming this demographic to see this as normal.

The third and final reason I see for our relationships failing so much is the lack of forgiveness and desire to work things out. Lack of understanding. All learned behavior though. Through entertainment and social media people form the beliefs on what the recourse should be for mistakes in a relationship. You ever do something wrong to your girl and she never let's it go? You ever laugh at another man's joke on the timeline and your boyfriend can't deal with it but he jokes all the time with women? We're just so conditioned to not forgive and to not allow people to make mistakes. On a broad scale but even more in relationships. A lot of people stay in bad relationships too long but said relationships, the ones with potential to be good, never get there because the two people can't get past the things they've already been through. Sometimes we can't get past the things our ex or last situation put us through and we carry that baggage, that paranoia, and that resentment into a new relationship and poison it from the beginning. So all of these things play into what I see is Post Traumatic Relationships. How do we fix it? The same way you help with a PTSD diagnosed soldier, you talk about it. You listen. You empathize. You compromise. You have to be determined to be the change. You have to be determine work together. You have to be selfless and consider what the other person has dealt with and is still dealing with in their life.



Just my thoughts

Text Messages Ruined Relationships

"Ma, our time together is our time together, and our time apart is our time apart... So love Jay with your mind girl and not your heart" - Jay Z; Rapper, Mogul, Entrepreneur

"Welcome to Crisp County"... that's what the sign read. We had finally made it. My grandma and I. Traveling back to Albany, Ga, my hometown, from Raleigh, NC where my mom and I resided at the moment. It was at that moment I saw something amazing. For reference, Crisp county is about 30 minutes outside of Albany. Exit 99 on I-75 is Ga-300 that leads you into my small town. It was when we reached this point that my grandma pulled out her outdated flip phone and called my granddad to let him know to go ahead and meet us in the city to pick her up (My grandma lives in the "country"). She gets off the phone and proceeds to take her head scarf off that she's gracefully worn the entire 9 hour ride. She styles her hair, applies makeup, and puts the right hint of perfume on. All in a matter of 15 minutes. My grandma, at the time, was in her early 70's. "Grandma, y'all must be going somewhere?", I asked. "No Pooh, we going home." Confused, I asked, "So why are you getting so done up?". With a quickness her answer was, "My husband haven't seen me in a week, the first time he see me it's not going to look like I'm going to sleep". I was floored.

This was 4-5 years ago. Probably the genesis of my thought process. Over time I have come to the conclusion, TEXT MESSAGES RUINED RELATIONSHIPS!!! Sure, this can't be the only factor. But I think it's so underrated how big of a factor text messages played in this. My grandma and granddad have been together over 40 years. What I realized is that, in all those years, they always had time to miss each other. They both had jobs, friends, obligations, and hobbies that took them momentarily from each other. In their time, best case scenario, was a house phone attached to the wall. A house phone that was generally used for real simple and quick exchanges. There was no expectation for 24 hour attention or gratification. There was no expectation to have every minute of their days dedicated to each other. Fast forward to our generation, when our phones being in our hands are almost as important as oxygen being in our lungs. I'm not here to slander communicative relationships. Communication, not just of problems, is actually my top priority in an intimate relationship. In almost all relationships actually. But I remember a time, being apart of the last generation old enough to remember life pre internet yet young enough to be deeply ingrained in its maturation, where you had to wait on a phone call. I remember fighting with my older brother for phone time between him being on the phone or being on our dial up internet connection so I could talk to the cute girl in class. This is life pre social media and text messages. This is even pre handheld cell phones. My dad had a bag car phone mounted in his car. I had a beeper. Not the beginning of the end Motorola two way pagers, I had a real beeper. This was when you had to focus your attention on the girl/ guy you were most interested in and pray and wish for two hours per night of phone conversation. You went all day planning what you would say to start the convo. What you'd do if her mom answered the phone instead of you. What time you were going to call. And, which videos on 106 and park you couldn't wait to talk about to her (Maybe that was just me). My point is, there was an art to this. Even then you had Myspace and other early social networks, you had to WAIT to get the computer. Now, the {market} is oversaturated.

Once cell phones modernized and added text messages, that was the beginning of what I call unreasonable expectations. Over time this phenomenon materialized into social networks being easily accessed via smartphones then into Blackberry Messenger, then now iMessage. Don't get me wrong I love Apple as much as Steve Jobs and all the convenience technology provides but what it makes inconvenient is building a relationship with substance and realism. People argue now about how long it takes someone to text back, or which words they abbreviated, or if they read their message and didn't immediately respond. All of which are pointless trivial issues, but if you let a small problem exist long enough, it becomes a big problem. My grandfather didn't have to worry about texting my grandma every 5 minutes during his work shift. If my grandma decided to come visit us for the week she didn't have to make sure she facetimed my granddad or texted back before he took his next breath. What text messages did was open the floodgates, and the levy broke. We fostered a dependency on instant gratification and constant attention that has made it almost impossible to ever do enough. What text messages have also allowed to happen that I couldn't manage from the wall phone with the long crinkled cord at my grandma's house is for people to entertain multiple people simultaneously. Not simultaneously like in the same day or same week or even same month, people can literally be on phone with one person and texting another. Seconds later tweeting. Seconds later replying to someone else's message. There's almost no chance for undivided attention. Even on a scale of seconds. Text messages led to the boom in social media that allows Jason to talk to Erica in California from Texas, Erica is connecting with Tony in New York, and Tony has Marissa in Miami.  It's a dangerous web of possibilities. Overexposure is never a good thing. On any medium. But I think it has been the first domino that pushed so many down that has led to the mass communication and even more massive disconnection of a generation from love and substance and verbal communication.

There's no going back, text messages are here to stay, but ask yourself, if you had to communicate with your partner in strictly a verbal manner for 30 days would you survive? If you couldn't text, dm, or tweet your partner for a month would your bond get stronger or worse? I'll take that a step further, if you couldn't look at any of their social media pages at all for a month, could you? Because how much do you have to communicate directly if you have most of their daily thoughts already literally in the palm of your hands? Challenge yourself and see if you could do it for one work week?

Just my thoughts!

Reply, share, and think about this.

Some food for thought- Did you eat ?! :My personal take on the latest release by Solange"

“I am feeling kinda hungry cause my high is coming down

Don't feed me yours cause your food does not endure

I think I need a cup of tea, the world keeps burning

Oh what a day, what a day what a day” – E. Badu

This past week Solange invited us to have a seat at the table and I must say it was delicious. The meal served was nothing short of your great-grandmother (who I was blessed to know for a huge part of my life) cooking up a family dinner on Sunday. On the menu, friend chicken, black eyed peas, corn bread, collard greens and a glass of sweet iced tea brewed from a hot stove. My southern background crept out in the most glorious way. Solange fed our soul with her words and a psychedelic mood, floating over funky beats giving us what we’ve been craving.

She captures exactly what it means to be black in this country today. Culture appropriation. Racism. Injustice of our black men and women. The struggles. The pain. The innovation. The pride. The heartbreak. The joy.

The surprise for me on this album were the interludes spoken by Mr. No Limit himself, Master P. I took this as the fried chicken, he was the meat. Mama Tina and Dad’s interludes being the flour and that extra season sprinkled throughout. Master P takes us back to the beginning of his company, No Limit Records. He paints the picture of what life was like for blacks back then and what it is for us now. The conversations with his grandfather, him taking his idea to shop his CDs in the back of his trunk like the Avon lady that he saw in his hood and later ended up on the music charts when everyone told him he wouldn’t happen. That spoke to me and the youth of today, keep pushing and be innovative. No is not the final answer. He had the formula perfected so much that a white man was going to buy it from him, sound familiar?!

Every fashion trend, hair style and musical sound sounds like us. We did it first. It came naturally to us and someone became fascinated with it and copied it to make it their own.

Solange makes sure to address it. Songs like F.U.B.U., which was a popular apparel brand back in the day, For Us By Us, addresses culture appropriation.

Lyrics “For us, this shit is from us Get so much from us Then forget us”

The list of “things” that have been stolen from us runs too long to even start. Things you can’t even put a price tag on like our pride, joy and our lives. We’ve lost so many black men in the last few weeks it’s hard to count, “And you’re a criminal just who are”.

We feel the hurt and pain.

And we are enraged and mad.

In the song “Mad” Solange lets us know that we have all the right to be mad, but where is that going to get us. The frustration and the questions that come from the people surrounding wondering why we are upset with the recent events. She ends with “I’m not feeling allowed to be mad” and how mentally draining it is for her. Over the last few weeks I think that has been the mindset of people of color, and has been for years. The injustice has never been right and we are running out of ways to ask for people to understand where we are coming from. Running out of ways to ask for help. Socially conscious and thought provoking. Telling us to let it go, you can be mad, but don’t let it hold you down. Not to mention we earned a decent verse from Lil’ Wayne.

She warns us in “Weary” to fear the events of this twisted world.

Along with feeling the hurt and struggles of being black I got the feeling of pride about being black. I got happy that my curls are nappy. Mama Tina blessed us with words that makes us proud of our skin that is kissed and stained by the sun. Making us proud to be black and not apologetic about it. I immediately wanted to soak in a tub of coconut oil, shea butter and the tears of those who complain about us being proud of our heritage. I instead adjusted my crown, my head full of kinks and coils.

“Don’t touch my hair” speaks to what it’s like to be a black girl. The same tight curls that the laugh at they take straws and hot curlers to mimic. Our big black lips they copy, drawing them on or getting them filled in. Our big black butts they kept us on show for they spend dollars getting it pushed into them. She sings about her hair being her crown, where she wears her pride, her feelings and all of her glory. Her Black Girl Magic. She plays on words (with our girl Kelly Rowland) saying that she has magic and not to let anyone steal it. But the joke is we naturally possess it and it flows in abundance.

Favorites like “Cranes in the Sky” talk about avoidance. Something that is rather big for me because I always choose to deal with something later on than when it needs to be addressed. She sings about running away and not being able to escape it. What that “it” is for her is undefined, but that “it” for us could be anything. Love, financial burdens, hurt from our past. She concludes what we have always known, you can’t run from it. You have to face it head on.

There are so many favorites and so many different moods that are invoked. I hope that people took away what I took from it, be proud of your blackness and continue to be great. You are always going to be unappreciated, unloved, copied and always have something to be mad about. But you can’t stay mad, hurt or let down forever, adjust your crown and move forward.

Pull up a seat.

Get full.